


Moments In Time

by OrionRedde, Shyrstyne



Series: Heart Hotel Stands AU [3]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: (it's not permanent also as per canon), Canonical Character Death, DiZ is a high key bastard, Gen, mild hints of akusai if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21683422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrionRedde/pseuds/OrionRedde, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shyrstyne/pseuds/Shyrstyne
Summary: How quickly a year flies by, Roxas learns.
Series: Heart Hotel Stands AU [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1478012
Comments: 29
Kudos: 166
Collections: Sea-Salt Family Fics (KH)





	Moments In Time

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly different setup for this fic, more like snapshots than a long form thing, but like i said, I couldn't do the day by day thing again. I hope you all enjoy anyway.

Riku walks into the top floor and comes face to face with himself. 

Literally.

He automatically falls into a battle stance, watching warily, but aside from placing himself between him and the blonde girl nearby, his other visibly tries not to react. 

He met his other only once, deep in the basement. He doesn’t know what to expect. 

“You must be the original.” His other says, confusing Riku greatly, who remembers quite distinctly having to fight the stubborn, hardheaded boy. 

“Huh?” Is his not so eloquent answer. 

The girl walks forward and puts a gentle hand on his others arm. 

“I’m sorry.” She whispers, heard only because the room is oppressively quiet. “I took those memories from you before, when Larx-.... You’ve met.”

Riku sees the other clench his fists, and then release them with a sigh. 

“It’s not your fault.” He says. She casts her gaze down like she doesn’t believe it. 

“Where’s Sora?” Riku demands. Perhaps it’s rude of him, but his priorities are elsewhere. 

“He’s here.” The girl gestures to the massive pod in the center of the room. It’s surface becomes translucent, and he sees Sora floating peacefully inside. 

He looks up at the sleeping boys face wistfully for just a moment too long, and then turns his gaze back to the other occupants of the room. 

“I’m gonna need you guys to explain what happened.”

-

Roxas isn’t very aware when he first wakes up. He’s carted around by the other members like a particularly vacant puppet. He doesn’t react to the wispy ghost that follows him around either. 

-

DiZ does not like Haru. He tolerates Naminé but it’s clear from the beginning it’s only due to her usefulness. Haru _hates_ DiZ. 

Riku tries to keep the peace, but in honesty he’s not fond of DiZ either. 

Mickey is too often running around with other missions. Riku misses him during these times, misses his patient stability. 

_For Sora_. He reminds himself. 

-

When Axel finally comes back from Castle Oblivion, he’s different. Roxas barely notices, having been only barely awake when he’d left. 

“My ghost fights the heartless with me.” He tells Axel on the clocktower one day. “I think it’s tried to talk to me sometimes but I can’t understand it. I wonder what it’s trying to say.”

Axel gets a weird expression after that. But then he always does when he looks at the gray-green wisps of Roxas’ ghost, so he doesn’t think much of it. 

-

Zexion sees DiZ in Twilight Town. He ducks his head and hides in an alleyway, attempting to calm his racing heart-

 _It can’t be Ansem._ He tries to tell himself. _No matter how much his darkness smells like him._

-

Roxas introduces Axel and Xion. He likes to think it went well. 

His ghost has a tendency to gravitate towards Axel. He thinks it’s trying to talk to him too. He feels bad none of them know what it's saying. 

-

Riku and Haru… well he won’t say they get along, but they are at least united in their goal. Whatever happened between them apparently really endeared Sora to Haru (as if the boy could do anything else, Riku thinks with fondness), and both boys find themselves protective of the quiet Naminé. 

Naminé works hard to try and put Sora back together. It’s all going very well until it’s not. 

-

Xion and Roxas both have keyblades, until suddenly they don’t. 

-

DiZ blames Naminé. Haru very nearly comes to blows with him over it. Riku heads out to figure out more about this new mystery factor. 

-

Roxas’ ghost hovered over Xion when he was asleep, apparently. He’s glad. He wants Xion to be safe. Sometimes it will randomly shift over to her. He just wishes it didn’t leave him feeling so alone. 

-

“A nobody?”

“I don’t know. She wears the coat.”

“So do you.”

Riku doesn’t have anything to say to that. 

-

“How about.. Fan?”

“What are you doing?” Axel appears on the clocktower in a swirl of darkness. Roxas grins, looking away from where his wispy ghost floats ever patient. 

“I’m trying to figure out the ghost’s name!”

“And ‘Fan’ was what you came up with?” Axel snorts. 

“I don’t know how names get chosen. I just have a feeling it’s.. related somehow.”

“Related to fans?”

“Well I don’t know, why don’t _you_ try?”

Axel refuses to even offer suggestions. 

-

Riku knows Ansem hasn’t completely disappeared. He knows that darkness is still there, and probably always will be. 

Sometimes he feels like someone is trying to talk to him. He’s too scared of who it might be to listen. 

-

“I’m scared.” Roxas says. His ghost floats impassively. 

He’s asleep, Roxas is distantly aware, but it’s a disconnected sort of awareness. The ground below him is smooth like polished marble, or perhaps glass. He can’t see it though, beyond a faint orange glow at his feet. 

“What if she doesn’t wake up?”

It’s been days since Xion fell into a coma. 

The ghost floats a little closer. 

“I can’t be scared though. That’s what the others keep saying. You can’t be scared without a heart.”

“No.”

The word is quiet and wispy, Roxas barely hears it, but his head jerks up at his ghost in shock. 

“You spoke!”

The ghost just floats. 

“What did you mean ‘no’?”

“Heart…. You have a....”

“I.. have a heart?”

There’s a barely there nod, and then the ghost vanishes. 

Roxas is left alone with his thoughts. 

-

Axel watches Saïx from a distance. He wonders why he hadn’t noticed how far they’d drifted. He wonders if he would have at all without his encounter with Sora and Ventus to make him realize just how alone and guilty and _sad_ he felt _all the time._

He wonders if Saïx feels just as alone. 

He sees their situation in an entirely new light, and the next time Xemnas pointedly reminds Saïx of their lack of hearts Axel can’t help but notice how completely he- how they _all_ \- buy into it. None of them even think to question it. 

It had felt so true, all those years ago when the numbness was fresh, but now…

He meets Saïx in his room, unannounced and without forewarning. Saïx narrows his eyes at Axel sitting on the end of his bed with arms crossed, but he doesn’t tell him to get out. 

It’s something. 

“What are you doing here?” Saïx asks, brusque and to the point. Isa might have said the same, but there’s a casual friendliness that’s missing now. Axel tries not to think about how much that hurts- how much it’s hurt for a long time while he refused to admit it. He needs to make Saïx understand that. Even now he’s not totally sure how to do it. 

“We need to talk.”

It’s.. a start. 

-

“He talked to me!”

“Your ghost?” Xion asks, excited. “Did he tell you his name?”

“It’s a He?” Axel asks, though somehow he doesn’t seem surprised either. 

“He didn’t tell me his name..” Roxas admits. “But there was something else…”

-

“It will kill her.”

Riku.. doesn’t like that. Haru looks away. 

“There’s nothing we can do?”

“And why should we? The replica is nothing of substance, merely stolen pieces cobbled together to form someone not even whole.” DiZ says, utterly uncaring of the vicious glares sent his way by Haru.

Naminé just closes her eyes, as if waiting for an inevitable end.

Riku is starting to question just how necessary DiZ is to Sora’s reconstruction. 

-

It’s not the worst conversation Axel has ever had to sit through, but it’s not exactly comfortable either. 

He thinks he connected with Saïx in a way they haven’t in years. He _hopes_ he has. If not then the conversation did nothing but make him realize just how badly he missed his oldest and dearest friend. 

When he goes to the clocktower that evening, he tells Roxas and Xion some old stories about some stupid, foolhardy boys who once tried to do the right thing and had paid the highest price for it. 

-

Zexion runs into Riku. Literally. Even his heightened senses don’t help when he’s absorbed in research, and walking helps him think. Riku dodges his questions and Zexion responds in kind. 

He starts keeping tabs on the mansion after that. 

-

Saïx still isn’t fond of Roxas and Xion and it shows, but it doesn’t take much to unearth why once Axel starts digging. 

They keep talking. 

-

Riku goes home, just to check. Kairi’s taken up sword fighting and martial arts lessons in the months he’s been gone. 

She finds out of the way corners to practice magic. She has no one to teach her, so she mostly practices what little she already knows from her time fighting from Sora’s heart. The shield of flowers makes an appearance, and though Riku has only painful memories of it, he could not be more proud of her. She summons waves of water from the air to crash through an ever widening area, and forges a blade of ice to strike a homemade dummy with. 

It’s far more effective than the silly wooden swords they had all once played with on these sandy shores.

It’s a way of wielding magic he’s never seen before. He wonders if it’s because there’s been no one to tell her she can’t, or if it’s some unique side effect of being a Princess of Heart. 

He watches from afar as she wipes her brow after a particularly brutal workout. 

He misses her so much. 

He turns around and walks into a dark portal instead. 

-

Xemnas is planning something. Even Saïx doesn’t know the details and it puts Axel on edge. Saïx is worried Xemnas is catching on to them.

Something is wrong with the kids.

It scares him. 

-

Riku doesn’t know if the voice beneath his skin is getting louder or if he’s just paying more attention. It still scares him. He tightens the blindfold again. 

-

Zexion watches Naminé as she wanders the courtyard in one of her rare excursions outside. DiZ shows himself only minutes later, reprimands ready on his tongue; she is instrumental in Sora’s recovery after all, she cannot be engaging in such childish antics. 

Zexion remembers the hand holding his, and a kindly voice asking if he wanted to go outside and play. 

He sinks into the shadows. 

-

“Please, Isa. They don’t deserve this.”

Saïx gives him a long, level look, and for a long moment Axel thinks he might refuse. 

“Okay.” He says, and Axel’s eyes light up. “Let’s figure out a plan.”

-

Zexion sneaks into the mansion and steals Naminé out from under all their noses. It’s pathetically easy. 

He portals out, location chosen at random, but somehow Naminé doesn’t seem worried. 

“What are you hoping to do?” She asks. 

“Revenge.” He says simply. She hums. 

“Is that so.”

“You don’t believe me?” He asks. She shakes her head. 

“It’s not that. I’m just not sure.. what’s the point?”

He grits his teeth. 

Revenge _was_ the point. A pointed knife directed at the cause of a lost childhood, of every wrong ever done to him, of a future he may never have as he is now. 

He doesn’t have time to ruminate further, because a snarling ball of silver hair leaps out of a portal and tackles him to the ground. 

-

It’s a short fight. Naminé keeps Haru from killing him. 

-

Riku joins them, and suggests a plan both sensible and absolutely insane in equal measure.

-

Xion runs. 

Roxas runs. 

Axel's plan falls apart. 

He tries to go after them, tries to talk Xion down from her fate. 

None of it matters. 

-

Roxas holds onto the memories of Xion with both hands and every cell in his body. He screams and he screams and he _screams_ , even if it’s mostly on the inside. 

He storms the castle, still screaming inside. He won’t let Xion go. He _won’t._

His ghost has a shadow now. 

-

Riku is ordered to bring Roxas in. 

It goes about as well as expected.

-

Axel stumbles into Saïx’s room, Winner stick clutched in one hand. 

~~Xion~~ is gone. Roxas is missing. 

He doesn’t know what to do. 

-

Riku drags Roxas’ unconscious form into the basement. He avoids Naminé and Haru’s gazes. He tugs his hood up. He doesn’t want them to look at him in this new form any more than he wants to look at himself.

“Guess you don’t have to worry about being mistaken for me anymore.” Haru’s weak attempt at a joke falls entirely flat. Naminé elbows him in the ribs. 

-

Saïx shows the most emotion he has in years upon seeing Axel stumble into his room, eyes widening and hands reaching up in an aborted movement, like he wants to do something but isn’t sure what. 

It’s that alone that tells Axel he must look an absolute mess. 

“Isa.” Axel’s voice breaks. He reaches up and drags his hands down his cheeks, smudging the ancient markings below his eyes. 

He wasn’t supposed to cry any more. 

But he really needs to right now. 

He squeezes his eyes shut, feeling the wetness make its way down his face. 

He feels hands pull him forward, and for the first time in nearly a decade, his best friend hugs him. 

-

Riku hates his new form. 

But the voice is clearer now, if still faint, and it’s not Ansem. 

_‘Who are you?’_ He asks it. There’s a long pause as he can feel it almost physically struggle for an answer. 

_‘Steadyearth, groundbelow’_

_‘Earth?’_

The voice struggles with words. Feelings are easier. 

_‘Yesnosortof.’_

_‘Ansem called you Guardian.’_

The pleased feeling he gets in return makes him think that name might have been the only thing Ansem might have done right in his life. 

_‘Yesgood, guardianprotectorshield thankyou oneIchose.’_

One I chose?

He tries to ask, but the voice has fallen silent, the exhaustion of talking taking its toll. 

He thinks back to old stories on soft beach sands. He can barely remember those times, so long ago, but he tries to remember anything Sora might have told him about when he had first gotten his heart mates. 

He knows Sora saw his heart mates most often when he slept.

Riku isn’t ready to sleep yet. 

_Earth._ He thinks. _Dirt? No. Cliff? Plateau? Mountain?_

He’ll know it when he hears it he’s sure, he just has to hit the right word. 

-

When he’s done shaking, Isa surprises him by pulling out a well worn notebook. He flips it open, and everything in it is written in a code even Axel can’t understand, but Isa flicks open a pen anyway. 

“There’s nothing left to do, Isa.” His heart, whatever tiny fragments he’s somehow managed to regrow, can’t take the false hope. Saïx scoffs. 

“This is why I’m the planner of the two of us.” He says. “There’s still a chance, and as long as there’s a chance, we can work with that.”

Axel blinks, long and slow, before a grin splits his face. 

“You always were the stubborn one.”

Saïx gifts him with a smile that looks almost like Isa again. 

“It’s half the reason we’re here, after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> to those of you who called Terra and Roxas Stands, my hat off to you.. though they're both a little fragmented. Unfortunately Roxas doesn't get to keep his, since it returns to Ven once he merges with Sora.
> 
> on a programming note, the kh2 adaption is not yet done, so we're going back on hiatus until it is. unfortunately depression season has hit us and work has slowed to a crawl. We're still plugging away at it, don't worry, but between just how _big_ the kh2 adaption has ended up being (for us anyways), and everything else it could be a bit before it's done. Sorry!


End file.
